Western Avenue, the muscular 25-mile north/south commercial thoroughfare has a funky midsection between 31st and 32nd.

The street bulks up there. And its accompanying overpasses, barrier walls and streetlight bases are still dressed in snazzy Art Deco, courtesy of a $1.8 million re-do in 1940. The street's garb is faded a little after seven decades, but its beauty is still there. Indeed, it makes one wish streets and overpasses could be designed this beautifully today.

The late Andy Warhol's famed Silver Clouds is billowing around the interior of IIT's Crown Hall. It's worth checking out.

One thousand helium-filled mylar balloons--seemingly with minds of their own--rise and float around the interior of the Mies van der Rohe-designed glass pavilion/masterpiece/home to the IIT's College of Architecture. Warhol and engineer Billy Klƒ¼ver created Silver Clouds, which debuted at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1966, and it became an instant icon of modern art. The folks at the Mies van der Rohe Society at IIT say the Crown Hall showing of Clouds is the biggest installation of the work yet, with scores of balloons joyously animating the modernist building's huge interior.

Jokes aside, what do we do with the empty multiplex?‚ Not just this one, but the others that'll likely come on line as the movie-going audience fractures and distracts itself with DVDs, Mp3 players and the very device you're reading this blog on.‚ And we can't depend on movies with blue characters to solve the problem, no matter how profitable they seem. "Avatar" 's $520 million gross is exceptional--only if you don't adjust for inflation. If you do, 1939's "Gone With the Wind"‚ grossed the equivalent of $1.4 billion in today's cash. In that matrix, "Avatar" barely out-grosses "Butch Cassidy‚ and The Sundance Kid."

Some of the closed multiplexes will become churches, no doubt, as did the old Hillside Theater in the late 1990s, and that's okay.‚ But the rest of them: could they be reused for live community theater? Or if possible, multiplexes of musical acts. Imagine a choice of 10 acts on 10 different stages in a single building.

The theaters could also become independent movie houses where the next budding‚ Cassavetes,‚ Micheaux or Lemmons can get their works‚ screened before a live audience?

Lee Bey is away for the remainder of this week. He will return on Monday. Instead of staying dormant, we bring you some of his work from the archives. This post originally ran on January 15, 2010.

(photo by Lee Bey)

That's a funky sign, right there.

You can almost hear the wah-wah pedals as your eye washes over the bell-bottomy "Real Estate" lettering and the company's name squinting through those low-profile, late 1960s/early 1970s orange and black graphics.

But Newmann & Associates has been out of business for years. Which means this fantastic piece of street advertising--visible from the southbound lanes of Cottage Grove south of 75th Street--will ultimately fade away like the business that sponsored it. The sign has joined the ranks of ghost signs ever-so-slowly vanishing on brick walls all across the city.

Today's offering from the unbuilt architecture files: a 1949 plan to construct a massive--and exceedingly modern--complex of government buildings in southwest corner of the Loop.

The complex boarded by Madison, Van Buren, Congress and Canal was proposed by the Chicago Plan Commission, back when the commission did actual planning, rather than grant approval to projects brought before it.

The former St. Dominic Roman Catholic Church has stood at Locust and Sedgwick for 105 years. Two completely different neighborhoods have come and gone during that time.

The old neighborhood was the first to go; bulldozed in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for the Cabrini-Green public housing development. Four decades later, most of Cabrini is gone--pushed aside for yet another a new community. The church has been closed since 1990. It hasn't fallen, but it sits. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese still owns the building and keeps it up rather well.